Until a couple of years ago, Matthew McConaughey’s career was a Hollywood in-joke.

Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past was bad. Fool’s Gold was worse. And you don’t need to be an acid-tongued cynic to rename Failure To Launch as Failure To Act.

If there was a bad rom-com, he’d be the leading man.

Yet the 44-year-old Texan has been turning a corner of late. From The Lincoln Lawyer to Magic Mike and his smallish turn in last month’s Wolf Of Wall Street, McConaughey is emerging as a highly-credible actor.

Not Laurence Olivier, by any stretch, but as dependable as, say, Matt Damon or Mark Wahlberg.

In this true-ish story, he plays hard-boozing, womanising trailer-park tenant Ron Woodroof who, after a drunken tryst with a needle-happy rodeo girl, is diagnosed with HIV in 1985 and given a month to live.

Soon the bar-brawling, copper-plated SoB finds his similarly-bigoted friends falling away as they start to question his sexuality. Realising the States’ health service isn’t up to the job of keeping him alive, Ron heads to Mexico for experimental medication and then sets up an ad-hoc over-the-border dispensary.

For $400 a month, the Dallas Buyers Club doles out pills to other HIV/Aids sufferers, bringing Woodroof into conflict with the authorities but eventually forcing a change in the law.

This is very much an Issue Movie, a bit like Philadelphia (1993) or Milk (2008), and perhaps that’s why the makers couldn’t resist tweaking the facts to up the emotional oomph.

A bit of online research reveals Ron wasn’t a homophobe and that his tragic transgender partner in crime (played by Jared Leto) never existed.